Caste and Tech with Murali Shanmugavelan and Sareeta Amrute

Mar 30, 2026

Murali Shanmugavelan, researcher of caste, media, and tech, and Sareeta Amrute, anthropologist of race, caste, and global tech labor, discuss how caste shapes IT workplaces and digital infrastructures. They probe myths of tech neutrality, how AI and platforms erase nondominant practices, moderation gaps around caste hate, and why legal and organizational change alone are insufficient.

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ANECDOTE

Grandmother's Story Shaped an Anticaste Lens

Sareeta described her maternal grandmother's life as a formative personal history informing her caste work.
The grandmother, a Brahmin widow educated at Karve's home, migrated to the U.S. and embodied stepping outside orthodox caste norms.

INSIGHT

Tech Neutrality Is A Myth Rooted In Inventor Narratives

Sareeta explained the tech-as-neutral myth stems from histories that treat inventions as disembodied acts of individual genius.
That myth abstracts technology from labor, material infrastructure, and political contexts, masking how inequality travels into systems.

INSIGHT

AI Produces Sanitized Rituals Not Lived Practices

Murali contrasted sanitized AI outputs with lived ritual diversity using Mahashivaratri as an example.
He noted models return Sanskritized versions while non-Sanskritized graveyard rituals and trance practices are erased from outputs.

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This episode features a conversation with Murali Shanmugavelan and Sareeta Amrute about how caste structures IT workspaces and communication infrastructures. We began with their reflections on how they came to scholarship and advocacy on caste. The rest of our discussion covered a range of topics including, the ideology of tech as immaterial and disembodied, the role of tech within racial and caste supremacist projects, how and why large language models systematically favor dominant caste norms, the internal and external pressures required for tech companies to advance social equity, the necessity and limits of law in advancing protections against caste hate speech and other forms of identity-based violence and discrimination, and the need to balance visibility and secrecy as two dimensions of the anticaste struggle.

Guest bios:

Murali Shanmugavelan: Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute and Senior Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Sareeta Amrute: Associate Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons School of Design, Affiliate Faculty of Anthropology at the New School, and Principal Researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute.

References:

Karve: Dhondo Keshav Karve set up a home and school for widows in the city of Pune in Maharashtra in 1896. The institution, which is now called Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Samstha, runs 60 sites for women's education.

Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement.

Western Ghats: a mountain range that stretches along the western coast of the Indian peninsula.

Sriram Krishnan: tech executive and Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in the second Trump administration.

Bruno Latour: French philosopher known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies.

Maha Shivarathri: annual festival to celebrate the deity, Shiva.

Mimi Onuoha: Nigerian American visual artist and academic whose work examines the effect of data collection and technology on society.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan: founder of the Dalit feminist organization Equality Labs and author The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition.

The Hindu Code Bills aimed to codify and modernize Hindu personal laws, promoting gender equality in marriage, inheritance, and adoption.

Gail Omvedt: sociologist and anticaste activist whose work on Dalit epistemology and politics was path-defining.

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